


Hyperthymesia

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 19:57:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2038047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor knows the human tragedy of forgetfulness is more a blessing than a burden.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hyperthymesia

“You know what I think?” she goads, her mouth left open to frame the yet-unspoken ending.  Something about it isn't quite the way she would normally speak to him, and he can only thank his own unanticipated resentment and his tongue for running off without him and putting just the sort of ideas in her head he’d been valiantly trying to avoid.  “I think you’re experiencing Captain-envy.”

She looks at him in the dark with her miraculously healed-over hands like he’s something new, like maybe someone might look at an ocean they’ve never seen.  When she approaches, it’s a little slow, appraising, smiling the way she would if she’d been told a secret.  It’s not an image he’s promoted: the Doctor as anything but something ineffable and alien, morally austere, something set apart from the everyday things she can easily catalog, and for good reason. 

The Doctor, who compares himself to oceans instead of other living things. Things with tides instead of heartbeats, both debatable in their cavernous depth. 

“You’ll find your feet at the end of your legs,” she instructs.  “You may care to move them.”

She takes his hands, despite attempts at distraction, her warm fingers closing over the knuckles he burned on the overheated console during their admittedly rough landing.  But not everyone’s got probably-stolen invisible spaceships that play _Moonlight Serenade,_ and Rose Tyler needs to learn that in the vast stretch of an infinite universe, even dancing isn’t something that can be easily cataloged.

And for good reason. 

The world might not end if the Doctor dances, but only because she’s already seen it: the end of this world.  It was their first trip.  A rite of passage, a kind of master class on acceptance after annihilation that someone who spends their time travelling with him must complete as a crash-course.  Companioning 101. 

A crash-course she’d aced by assimilating the information, changing the subject and pressing forward.  Asking for chips instead of a ride home, instead of the whole story of why he’d needed to show her the death of her planet because he still sees the death of his every time he closes his eyes. 

The whole story is just that he’s become twisted.  It’s probably less old age, less the length of time he’d gone avoiding what had once been the usual patterns of his life, and more a kind of initiation. 

It was selfish, bordering on cruel, that he would want to see the kind of pain he remembers every day on someone else’s face.  When he did see it, it was amorphous and subtle, like a change of season in her features, this kind of enormous abstract pain too large to fit inside a heart. 

But it wasn’t so much the pain itself he’d wanted to share, but the _memory_ of it. 

In retrospect, it’s maybe less like initiation and more like marking his territory.  It’s why birds sing. Like scent-marking, feral cats or domestic canines.  Visual, auditory, ritualized aggression. He’s burning something into her: the shared solidarity of knowing for certain what it feels like to be orphaned in the universe, like a planet slipped free of its star.

Or boiled to ash by it. 

“If ever he was a Captain,” he tells her while she begins a slow side-to-side sway, “he’s been defrocked.” 

Locked in her one-person mimicry of a slow dance, her mouth slow-stretches into a smile and the earth trembles under his feet in a kind of way that has nothing to do with Luftwaffe incendiaries and parachute mines.

******

He’s a stranger. 

The Doctor or not, that’s the long and short of it.  The idea of him being anything other than how he was--that this-new-him is replacing what came before--is stomach twisting to even consider.  Doctor or not, she’ll never see him again.  Not with that tight smirk or the debatably authentic Northern accent, the oil-smelling leather jacket and mercurial mix of flippant and clipped replies. 

He’d said it himself: the world is different now.  Everything is new.  They are something new. 

They are satsumas waiting at the bottom of a Christmas stocking, a sort of disappointment to smile though.  They are ash instead of snow.  A kind of ersatz version of something else. 

In the quiet of the house, Christmas night, Rose lies awake on the sofa while he’s off tending to the mess that’s been made of the TARDIS in his maniacal crash landing.  He’d made his apologies already, given her a crinkle-eyed sheepish smile that doesn’t feel the same as the old Doctor’s.  Before, he would smile, and she would smile.  Just on reflex. 

This Doctor smiles, and her impulse is to blush.  To duck her eyes away from his.  She can’t explain. 

(It doesn’t matter.)

It’s less a kind of mourning now than it had been, the Doctor’s absence soothed with the balm of inexplicable familiarity hiding somewhere in the unfamiliar lines of a new face, tones of voice, swings in mood.  With Christmas specials playing in rerun on the low-volume telly, brightness flickering high to low with scene changes of snow and starlit darkness, carpet and walls and lap blanket immersed in the all-spectrum glow from holiday fairylights hung around the front windows, it’s Rose’s own kind of time travel.  It’s a moment where she can close her eyes and let the familiar sensations transport her to a time when she’s ten years old on Christmas night, staying up late in reluctance for the long-awaited holiday to end.  The lingering smells of dinner still clinging to the walls, the warm-plastic smell of the lights. The shifting colors under her eyelids, the weight of the blanket, and the almost but not quite memorized soundtracks of the same holiday programmes she’d watched every year of her life. 

There’s a fine line where the comfort of the deeply familiar transmutes into the mundane.  Where banal familiarity renders that which is lost beautiful in retrospect.  Though dwelling too long on what _was_ instead of what _is_ \--that’s something the Doctor, neither of him, would wholly recommend. 

Because everything ends.  Because when she opens her eyes she’s nineteen again, and he’s a stranger. 

She can only hope it’ll be the last time she has to mourn the Doctor while he is still there, holding her hand.

*******

More rockets detonate with an eardrum stunning clap; the sky opens and rains white and green sparks.  He breathes slowly in the cold August dark, his breath carrying out in plumes of vapor like ghost-silk.  Above, the city lights reflect off fog and smoke, glowing an irradiated shade of dirty pink the way it does before a snow. 

Hand still clasped with his, Rose bumps his shoulder with hers, the way he’s been doing all day in a sort of inexplicable jovial haze.  That same haze that had fled suddenly, hit with a sharp gust of precognitive clarity.

He’d said a storm was coming, but this was what he’d meant.  This dizzy feeling.  A feeling of his pulse knocking strangely through his body.  It’s the absence of something, subtle like a drop in barometric pressure.  It’s something that’s vaguely off, and not just the temperature for a day in mid-August, with visible breath when it should have been a scorcher. 

Rose had said it herself once.  He’d taken her to the day her father had died, and she’d looked around, almost disappointed the world wasn’t dark with the portent of someone’s ultimate end.

But men die in the sunlight every day.  Storms come without a drop of rain.  It can happen in a moment, no warning.  Blink and something is over.  Blink and something is gone forever.  We are what we have lost.

He’d told her the past is a different country, but the future, well.  The future is a different language.  He can hear it whispering from beyond the horizon, something like wings beating in the dark--its cadence and sibilance is enough to feel its malintent, like touching sharp edges through cloth.  

“How can you tell?” she asks him, still clasping his hand.  “What sort of storm?”

He opens his mouth around a reply, but the words don’t tumble out right away.  His teeth cage back a thousand sentiments he’ll never conjure into proper words because he never looks them straight on, only regards them from the corner of his eye like the stormclouds crowding his mental peripheral, a bright light he has to squint to see past, except he can’t, because it’s like a flashbulb’s gone off in his head. 

They make him feel drained and too warm like he’s gone weeks without sleep.  They make him feel like a complete fool. 

She takes his lack of reply as a loss for words.  “Have you got a device?  Like, something that can predict the weather? _Reliably_ , I mean, not like when the weatherman on the telly says it’s going to be sunny and it rains the whole day.”

She’s handing him a distraction on a silver platter; he doesn’t know what he’d have said without it. Something he’d regret, he knows that much.  “Tell you what.  Been a long day, bet you’ve never been on an asteroid before.  _Well_ , hang on.  That nonsense with the black hole notwithstanding.”

“An asteroid?” She laughs and the sound walks up his spine like an insect.  It settles between his lungs, a kind of uncertain ache he doesn’t have a name to describe.  It’s an unreachable itch; a strange, whole-body hunger.  Like so many things, it’s not easily cataloged.  In fact, briefly, the entire English language eludes him, and it’s just the sound of her laughter that he has now, in place of thoughts.

He’d made a show once of balking at the idea of stationary housing and mortgage payments and drudging ennui, limping day after day in the same direction, standing still at sixty-seven-thousand miles per hour.  But this--it’s this particular brand of standing-still that unsettles him.  This give and take without a flurry of motion and excuses to touch without justification, something to distract them from whatever _this_ is.  This thing that’s happening in the spaces between every word they say, between their palms, this thing that’s buzzing between them like static shock--like the whole of the universe is holding its imaginary breath, a split-second hush before the downpour. 

It’s a sense of anxiety, like standing on a high ledge, feeling the tug of gravity and the urge to fall.  A countdown toward the inevitable reality of Rose Tyler as another fixture of his past, dancing with him amidst the rumble of German parachute bombs, clutching his hand under frozen tidal waves and fireworks and ash instead of snow.  Another ghost to pace the living tomb of his eidetic memory.

He clears his throat, hesitates.  The cold air is swollen with a kind of liquid weight, and the idea of trying to put words to these things now, in a dark, abandoned street prompted by a displaced fear of dwindling time--it feels unfair. 

“Regor Six!  Best outdoor bazaar in the all of Gamma Velorum--that’s a quad-system, oh, about...336 parsecs _that_ way,” he points skyward with his free hand as he’s done a thousand times before, pasting on a smile, choosing distraction over confrontation once again.  “There’s a mineral they mine there; highly compressed pressure-hypersensitive rock fascia unique to planets in the orbit of a spectroscopic binary combined with ionic particles from the stellar wind off a Wolf-Rayet Star.  You will learn just how reliable weather prediction can be, Rose Tyler.”

She smiles, her face lunar in the dark, luminous in a way that makes blazing fireworks look dull. 

*******

The last time they’d moved, Martha Jones had unpacked a box labelled “Mum’s Elephants”.  Carefully, she’d unrolled each fragile pachyderm from bubble wrap and newspaper, wondering why so much work would be put into something generally worthless.  She’d asked about them before, but all her Mum had to say about them was that elephants never forget.  Just that, and a little sly, sideways smile. 

Lying fully-clothed on a straw-mattress bed with an alien in the year 1599, a situation which likely fulfills the textbook definition of ‘out of the blue’—she understands why.

She’s turned toward the window, lost in the cobalt night sky untouched by light pollution and smog that would not build up for another three hundred years.  And she’s quiet enough, pretending to sleep, and maybe he’s paying little enough attention to her to believe it.  As though someone can be taken four hundred years into the past and be expected to sleep.  As though her mind isn’t still processing and fighting to soak it all in, despite her exhaustion.

But the silence of this night is quieter than anything she’s ever heard, the darkness more complete.  It’s what the world was before industrial progress.  Before the electric light and horseless carriage, before telly and trains and airports and billboards, _this_ is what the world was.  Moonlight and lead-glass, tapestry duvets.  The diesel smell of lamp oil, the chamber-pot aroma of the street gutters, matted with filthy straw.  She wants to remember all of it, even the nasty bits.  There has to be something she can take as a souvenir, something that won’t change the course of the human race by going missing.  She’ll ask the Doctor in the morning.  He’s awake, of course he is.  She can hear him breathing.  Even, long breaths in a pattern that anyone might mistake for human in terms of tidal volume, inspiratory and expiratory durations.  It’s only because she knows he’s not; she knows to listen and discern a variance in the airflow profile and the way sometimes he takes a breath and doesn’t let it out for five minutes. 

It’s all happened so fast, all this new information:  the moon as neutral territory, the Judoon, Plasmavores, Time Lords, spaceships, time travel, Shakespeare.  It’s like, she’s just gathered up all these unbelievable things and put them in her back pocket to sort out later.  When she’d acquired this skill, to compartmentalize such things, she’s not really certain.  Perhaps the last year or so, since the separation, since Anelise, since Leo had become a father and she…

She’s done what she’s always done:  what’s expected of her.  Martha, the reliable.  Martha, the shoulder to cry on.  Martha the unsinkable, logical, pragmatic.

Not today.  She hasn’t even told anyone she’s gone anywhere at all, and here’s she’s been to the moon and the year 1599 in a single twenty-four hour period.  So much for logic.

There’d been no souvenir from the moon, though.  Nothing that wouldn’t have just been from the hospital, really, if you didn’t count the still-faint X made in permanent marker only mostly scrubbed from the back of her hand.  Eventually, it will wash away too.

Yes, maybe she’ll ask the Doctor in the morning what she might nick from the Inn to remember it all by, and he’ll find it all silly since he’s claimed to have a flawless memory; he’ll never need a souvenir to remember anything.  There’s a medical term that describes it, in humans at least, a long name filled with consonants that don’t look right all in a row like every Latin-based condition that she’s spent hours drilling into her head for quick recall.  _Hyperthymesia_.  Near total recall of both semantic and episodic memory theoretically stemming from irregular development of the hippocampus and temporal cortex.  Long-term eidetic ability.  Medically speaking: highly improbable, but not impossible.  Though what is extraordinary in humans could be a biological mundanity to the esteemed race of Time Lords. Something that comes standard issue like two hearts and, from what she’s seen so far, a general disregard for personal safety.

Most of humanity, however, have limited memories, requiring objects to remind them of people and events their fragile minds can’t quite re-conjure for them on their own, an entire race struggling to remember while the Doctor never forgets.

Out of the dark, thoughts collide in her mind, like rocks clacking together to make sparks.

Her mum’s box.  Figures cocooned in bubble wrap and newspaper, carefully boxed for moving day, and Martha had always found them all so silly.  The idea of collecting things in general had never appealed to her, could never much see the point, and lying in the moonlight of long-ago, the answer materializes, made from the cogs and bolts of her own thoughts.

Her mum collected elephants for same reason anybody collects anything: stamps, ticket stubs, coins—to preserve the past.  Martha, she’s never been much of anywhere she’d really wanted a keepsake from.  Nothing she’d wanted to commemorate.  Except here.  Except this very literal past that she’s already half-panicked about forgetting.  She can’t preserve every second of it in her memory, every horrible smell or absence of sound, but she needs something.  Something that won’t wash off.

“Doctor?” She half rolls, craning her neck to see him over her shoulder. 

It’s a moment before he replies, a bit hoarse.  “Yeah?”

“Didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t.”

“I just…being that I’m going home in the morning.  It’ll sound silly to you, but…d’you think I could pinch something little, like a matchbook or, I dunno, anything, just to remember…”

“A souvenir?”  He pulls a face, wrinkles his nose.  “Really, Martha.”

“Bet old Will downstairs would be more sympathetic.  ‘ _Rosemary_ ,’” she recites proudly. “‘ _That’s for remembrance_.’  Right?”

“That idea’s far older than Shakespeare.”  In profile, he almost looks angry for a moment. “Add to that, it’s 1599, he hasn’t written _Hamlet_ yet.”

She gives a slow kind of sigh; there’s defeat in it.  “Suppose you’ve never needed anything like that.  Been everywhere…everywhen….yeah?  No need for a Time Lord to knock off a thimble to remember something.  You probably remember the day you were born.”

The Doctor doesn’t reply for a couple of his long, slow breaths.  He opens his mouth once, likely to correct her, but seems to think better of it.  In the Elizabethan dark, his eyebrows push together on his forehead and he twists suddenly, digging in his jacket pocket before withdrawing something round, a golden trinket that he spins in his fingers, one corner of his mouth drawn tight while he looks at it and then offers it to her for a look.

Surprised, Martha takes it in her fingers and jolts, shifting it abruptly to her other hand.  “Blimey!” she yelps, forgetting the late hour a moment before dropping her voice.  “Why’s it so _cold_?”

After a moment, the Doctor reaches to retrieve it, turning it over once more in his fingers with a kind pinched expression of desolation that makes Martha think that, perhaps, the human tragedy of forgetfulness may be more a blessing than a burden.

“Because,” he says vaguely, his voice light years away. “It’s going to rain.”

 


End file.
